Race, Gender and Human Behavior

RGHB's class tumbleblog, a platform for discussing social issues in the context of our class. Feel free to ask or submit anything, but please keep it school-appropriate. At the moment, we're working on our last-quarter test grade, so expect to see lots of original posts and commentary on reblogs. If you have any advice or would like to draw our attention to a particular subject, please feel free to use the ask function.

[leseanthomas-deactivated2021030]

I love it when Hip Hop works for the community. Not enough artists who make money off of the culture give back to prevent the circumstances that created the culture in the first place. You don’t see enough of this with all the noise/distractions out there regarding the culture’s image.

Source: http://www.complex.com/tech/2014/04/nas-microsoft-google-fund-tech-scholarships-general-assembly

[ephitania]

Thank You NAS!!!!

[sourcedumal]

YES!!!!!

[rascalbot]

Take boots, for example. [Vimes] earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

—Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms (via rascalbot)

This is how it is really expensive to be poor. 

(via everydayworldasproblematic)

ive used this so many times to explain to people why capitalism is awful and it works every time a+

(via waepenlesbian)

Presenting the Sam Vimes “Boots” Theory of Economic Injustice, everyone.

(via grammarpedant)

[dasenergi]

Why not ask whether heterosexuality exists? Are there truly people out there who are so disgusted by the same sex that they’ve never had a dream, a thought, a moment of desire for another person of the same sex? If so, why do these people have such a revulsion? Is it cultural? Is it biological? Both? We take heterosexuality for granted, but we still don’t know if it truly exists. All primates (with the exception of humans) are bisexual. Bonobos and chimpanzees especially. In human societies that are not corrupted by homophobia or biphobia (see Greeks, Canaanites, and various modern tribes), the people are bisexual. I think heterosexuality should be assumed to be a cultural invention until proven otherwise.

Kevin Johnston (via bleep0bleep)

This is one of the hills I always die on: ‘the Greeks’ were not ‘bisexual’. We don’t know what the Hell ‘the Greeks’ were. It was considered socially appropriate for a free adult male of a certain class background to express sexual desire for both (young) men and (usually young) women. In some parts of Ancient Greece, it was also considered socially appropriate for a free adult male etc. to seek sexual gratification via the insertion of his penis a) into the vagina or anus of a woman with whom he was in one of a series of codified social relation-structures (e.g.: she was his wife, she was his property, she was a prostitute) or b) between the thighs or into the anus of a younger man with whom he was in one of a series of even more fiercely codified relation-structures (definitely prostitute, probably property, sometimes very-complicated-social-dance-in-which-everyone-involved-tries-to-pretend-it’s-vital-to-the-moral-health-of-the-state-orgasms-what-orgasms). Mouths are risky territory and we won’t go there right now. We know next to nothing about the sexual appetites of men who did not belong to this specific nexus of age-class-background, and next to nothing about the sexual appetites of any women whatsoever.

I want to be clear that I’m not saying the Ancient Greeks were straight. Many of them demonstrably weren’t. And I’d go further than the OP here by saying that ‘heterosexuality’ is a cultural invention - not because there have never existed people who are only attracted to men or only to women, but because ‘sexuality’ is a cultural invention whatever you put in front of it. The Greeks didn’t even have the concept that you could distinguish between categories of people based on who they wanted to have sex with. Hetero-, homo-, bi-, and all other kinds of sexuality are terms we have made up to diagnose ourselves, not immutable ontological absolutes. This isn’t a startling discovery, it’s pretty much the bedrock (ha) of most modern theories of sexuality.

'Does heterosexuality exist?' and 'Are there people who are never attracted to people of the same sex?' are not the same question. For the Greeks, the answer to #1 is a straightforward (ha) 'no', the answer to #2 is 'we have no idea'.

(Take-home assignment: what does it mean for a sexuality to ‘exist’?)

[bajo-el-mar-blog]

Reading about abusive men and the way they think. Very unsettling and an incredible book so far. Here are my very professional notes.

[imnotreallyherecheckagainlater]

what book is this?

[tehbewilderness]

This is from “Why Does He DO That” by Lundy Bancroft.

[chemicalheart-deactivated202009]

I’m so glad I’m seeing more and more Lundy Bancroft quotes on my dash because this book CHANGES THE LIVES OF ABUSE VICTIMS. The programs run for rehabilitating abusive men through the courts? Bancroft DESIGNED THEM. His programs are replicated ALL OVER THE WORLD. He literally wrote THE book on abuser rehabilitation.

[queen-mayhem]

Here’s a link to a pdf copy. If you haven’t read this book yet, read this book.

[appropriately-inappropriate]

Can we talk about how it seems like the entirety of the book is online on PDF, this making it accessible to anyone with an internet connection?

That is how we stop abuse.

We enable everyone to know what it looks like, so that when it happens, they can shut it down.

[bhuttu]

Arm yrself with knowledge!

[birkenth0t]

Changed my life, would reccomend.

[morganapengdragon]

I’ve always been told not to give in to peer pressure but I’ve never been told not to pressure my peers and I think that shows how dysfunctional society is

[fndungeonmom]

real life plot hole found

[sorayachemaly]

Image credit: The Girl God 

10 Simple Words Every Girl Should Learn

These behaviors, the interrupting and the over-talking, also happen as the result of difference in status, but gender rules.

It’s not hard to fathom why so many men tend to assume they are great and that what they have to say is more legitimate. It starts in childhood and never ends. Parents interrupt girls twice as often and hold them to stricter politeness norms. Teachers engage boys, who correctly see disruptive speech as a marker of dominant masculinity, more often and more dynamically than girls.

For example, male doctors invariably interrupt patients when they speak, especially female patients but patients rarely interrupt doctors in return. Unless the doctor is a woman. When that is the case, she interrupts far less and is herself interrupted more.

This is also true of senior managers in the workplace. Male bosses are not frequently talked over or stopped by those working for them, especially if they are women; however, female bosses are routinely interrupted by their male subordinates.

As adults, women’s speech is granted less authority. We aren’t thought of as able critics or as funny.

Men speak more, more often, and longer than women in mixed groups (classrooms, boardrooms, legislative bodies, expert media commentary and, for obvious reasons religious institutions.)

Indeed, in male-dominated problem solving groups including boards, committees, and legislatures, men speak 75% more than women, with negative effects on decisions reached. That’s why, as researchers summed up, “Having a seat at the table is not the same as having a voice.”

Even in movies and television, male actors engage in more disruptive speech and garner twice as much speaking and screen time as their female peers.

Listserve topics introduced by men have a much higher rate of response.

On Twitter, people retweet men two times as often as women.

The best part though is that we are socialized to think women talk more. Listener bias results in most people thinking that women are hogging the floor when men are actually dominating. Linguists have concluded that much of what is popularly understood about women and men being from different planets, verbally, confuses “women’s language” with “powerless language.”

This preference for what men have to say, supported by men and women both, is a variant on “mansplaining.” The word came out of an article by writer Rebecca Solnit, who explained that the tendency some men have to grant their own speech greater import than a perfectly competent woman’s is not a universal male trait, but the “intersection between overconfidence and cluelessness where some portion of that gender gets stuck.” Solnit’s tipping point experience really did take the cake. She was talking to a man at a cocktail party when he asked her what she did. She replied that she wrote books, and she described her most recent one, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.The man interrupted her soon after she said the word Muybridge and asked, “And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?” He then waxed on, based on his reading of a review of the book, not even the book itself, until finally a friend said, “That’s her book.” He ignored that friend (also a woman) and she had to say it more than three times before “he went ashen” and walked away. If you are not a woman, ask any woman you know what this is like, because it is not fun and happens to all of us.

Last week as I sat in a cafe, a man in his 60′s stopped to ask me what I was writing. I told him, a book about gender and media and he said, “I went to a conference where someone talked about that a few years ago. I read a paper about it a few years ago. Did you know that car manufacturers use slightly denigrating images of women to sell cars? I’d be happy to help you.” After I suggested, smiling cheerily, that the images were beyond denigrating and definitively injurious to women’s dignity, free speech, and parity in culture he drifted off

In the wake of Larry Summers’ “women can’t do math” controversy several years ago, scientist Ben Barres wrote publicly about his experiences, first as a woman and later in life, as a male. As a female student at MIT, Barbara Barres was told by a professor after solving a particularly difficult math problem, “Your boyfriend must have solved it for you.” When several years after, as Ben Barres, he gave a well-received scientific speech, he overhead a member of the audience say, “His work is much better than his sister’s.”  Most notably, he concluded that one of the major benefits of being male was that he could now “even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man.”

 Really, practice those ten words. 

“Stop interrupting me.” 

“I just said that.”

“No explanation needed.”

[lhs-rghb]

Please, read the articles. It's incredibly enlightening.

[medievalpoc]

[part of a series on this exhibit]

xanthy-m submitted to medievalpoc:

I think some of these were aimed at kids more than adults. Can’t teach critical thinking too early :)

I couldn’t agree more with the second part, but I must admit I’ve had experience with far more adults than children who could probably benefit a lot from asking themselves these questions.

It is my sincere hope that people will ask these kind of questions when reading articles here like Binary Expectations: Revisiting the Aegean Skin Color Convention, and our modern translations of documents concerning transgender individuals among the ancient Scythians (connected to the historical “Amazons”) from other nations and cultures who have very strict definitions of gender.

How often do you think our modern concepts about family and gender have been imposed on the past? After all, if these concepts are never questioned, how could this affect our ideas about people living in the past?

There have been a rash of articles in recent years about how human remains assumed to be of this or that gender, after DNA testing, are “revealed” as a different gender than was assumed or assigned in previous decades (and sometimes, centuries!) because of hair, clothing, grave goods, positions within the grave, and assumptions about professions and activities that are “male” or “female”.

I personally would like to think that our approach to these ideas has evolved since Sir Arthur Evans hundred-plus-year-old claim that skin color as depicted in art marked gender in the works from Knossos….because if we go off of the actual evidence, there would have been a minimum of four genders among the people depicted in the artworks there.

Or maybe, just maybe, what we have is the assumption of both whiteness and a strict two-gender system common in Victorian analysis of both Art History and Ancient societies common in the society of the Victorian era, not that of the Bronze Age Mediterranean.

[theapplepielifestyle]

1. Girls Shalt Not Have Sex. (someone asked me what the guy word for ‘slut’ is and I couldn’t find an answer. it’s an old story: a rumour goes around that so-and-so blew a boy in the disabled toilets. the girl fakes a cough to get herself sent home to escape the classroom-wide hiss of ‘slut’ while the boy she blew walks into the same class and is greeted by an onslaught of high-fives) 2. Girls Shalt Love Boys. (when I was ten, there was a movie trailer where two girls leaned in for a kiss, and I felt sick for the rest of the day. it took four years along with faux-casual questions to friends useless quizzes on the internet entries in a diary that I later scribbled out to admit, fine, okay, yes, and another year after that to say it without mumbling) 3. Girls Shalt Not Be Bitches. (it took over ten years of school for me to realize my women teachers got called bitches for doing things that my male teachers got called efficient for. we were assigned to a group project in science class and whenever my friend tried to tell the others to quiet down so they could get on with the work, she was jeered into silence and she never found it fair that her boyfriend did the same thing and the noise stopped.) 4. Girls Shalt Have A Vagina. (she introduced herself with a deep voice and a gushing smile. she had a pink dress and an adam’s apple she had a necklace resting above her cleavage she had escaped from an all-boys high school and I didn’t understand until I learned later gender is more than the two rigid boxes that we are told to tick one of) 5. Girls Shalt Smile. (he frowned when the subject was brought up and he shrugged a lot as he explained that we look better when we smile. Less hostile. His shrugs stiffened when I asked him why we shouldn’t look hostile. ‘I dunno,’ he said, dropping to a mumble. ‘Girls aren’t s’posed to look hostile, I guess.’ The next time someone walked past me on the street and told me to smile, I gave him my sunniest grin and a middle finger.)

‘Five Commandments for Being A Girl I Unlearned,’ theappleppielifestyle. (via theprophetchuckshurley)

[intlwomenshealth]

When researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of Washington observed young people’s behavior in bars, they found that the man’s aggressiveness didn’t match his level of intoxication. There was no relationship. Instead, men targeted women who were intoxicated.

NPR: If He’s Sexually Aggressive in Bars, It’s Not Because He’s Drunk (via glorious—headfuck)

Imagine that

(via spoiledgrrrl)

[brodthepoet-blog]

[lhs-rghb]

I can relate to this. I'm not allowed to have any facial piercings, colored hair, or tattoos noticeable at my work. My question is what is so unprofessional about it?

[glsen]

A high school couple in New York say the school won’t let them go to prom together because one of them is transgender. 

We think everyone deserves to go to prom, no matter how they identify. Reblog if you agree. 

[lhs-rghb]

Discriminating against a student under 18 against their sexuality should be illegal, don't you agree?

[lhs-rghb]

I 100% agree that all Native American mascots should be diminished. Ones culture should not be a representation of a sports team. What if all American sports teams discontinued the use of any image or name referring to an American Indian. Would that solve the problem or change history? I doubt it but if someone that has 1/16 lineage to an American Indian nation would feel better if a sports team changed their name and mascot then sure go ahead and change it.

[rtrixie]

Media representation and privilege.

[lhs-rghb]

Is white privilege over-exaggerated?

[lhs-rghb]

What is the appropriate way for teacher to a student when the teacher is not familiar with a students background. Should the teacher try at all?

[lhs-rghb]

What's so degrading about being a woman?

[lhs-rghb]

Every woman should have her own opinion on gender. Everyone was raised to think differently and believes in different morals. I think it’s a disgrace that a women attacks another woman’s opinion for thinking independently. We were not put on this earth to dictate others to others what they should be doing…

[fuckyeahfeminist]

Before you blast others, take a look a little closer to home. The US is happy to sensationalize Orientalist perceptions of oppressive, anti-feminist regimes and cultures in the Middle East. The truth is, women all over the world face injustice of many kinds and degrees. SOLIDARITY, my friends. Solidarity.

(via World Bank)